Cloud Foundry at the OpenStack Design Summit

The Cloud Foundry development team presented Cloud Foundry BOSH at the OpenStack Design Summit on Wednesday in San Francisco, followed by a hackathon focused on adding OpenStack support. BOSH is an open source tool chain for release engineering, deployment and lifecycle management of large-scale distributed services. Cloud Foundry is designed to give customers a choice of clouds, and BOSH supports multiple underlying cloud infrastructure, including vSphere and AWS. BOSH has been used to deploy and manage CloudFoundry.com since its launch and is particularly useful for operating production instances of Cloud Foundry.

Our goals in participating in the OpenStack event were to meet key people in the OpenStack community and learn about OpenStack while explaining the core ideas behind BOSH and kicking off the implementation of BOSH support for OpenStack.

Vadim Spivak (@vadimspivak) kicked things off with a well-attended talk at 3pm. The slides are embedded at the bottom of this post. He first discussed the motivations for building BOSH and the goals for the project, as well as outlining its role in deploying and managing CloudFoundry.com. He then quickly delved into the details, outlining some of the artifacts used in BOSH as well as detailing the architecture of a full-scale BOSH deployment. Documentation for BOSH is available on Github.

The Cloud Provider Interface (CPI) abstracts the underlying virtualized infrastructure from the rest of BOSH, providing support for a variety of different infrastructure platforms. Today the project includes two implementations of the CPI, with production class support for vSphere and work-in-progress support for AWS. With the goal of kick-starting BOSH support for OpenStack, we held a hackathon at 6pm in the developer lounge focusing on an OpenStack CPI implementation. We provided food and alcohol to keep everyone fully fueled and sat down to work. With small groups clustered around a number of key members of the Cloud Foundry development team we started digging into the code.

By the end of the evening we had made good progress. In particular Vishvananda (@vish), working with Cloud Foundry’s Oleg Shaldybin (@olegshaldybin), was able to repurpose the existing AWS implementation to kick off a successful VM build on OpenStack. Fantastic progress!

We greatly enjoyed our day with the OpenStack community, we’d like to thank you all for your great welcome and interest in BOSH. A lot of folks helped make this happen. In particular, we’d like to thank Andrew Shafer (@littleidea), Lloyd Dewolf (@lloyddewolf), Josh McKenty (@jmckenty), Scott Sanchez (@scottsanchez) and Lauren Sell for helping to get this organized.

We really appreciate everyone’s interest and look forward to continuing to work with the OpenStack community for a long time to come.